Stepping up: How finance functions are transforming to ...

[Pages:72]Finance Effectiveness Benchmark Report 2017 Finance leaders are improving business results by investing in commercial insight, spending less time on transactional work and running at lower costs. This year's report takes a closer look at how this is being achieved by companies leading the way.

Stepping up

How finance functions are transforming to drive business results

Key lessons for all finance functions

Adding value Less than a quarter of finance time is spent delivering business insight

Investing in skills Top quartile companies pay their `insight' finance professionals 25% more

Focusing e ort Even in top quartile companies, analysts spend 40% of their time gathering data, not analysing

Making savings Leading finance functions cost 36% less than the median finance functions

Eliminating ine ciency Across many key finance processes, automation and process improvement can reduce costs by 35%-46%

Contents

01 How leaders are transforming finance 09 Developing an ambitious model for business partnering 21 Realigning the operating model to focus on value 27 Enabling new ways of working through technology 35 Moving to a culture that puts value creation first 39 Seek a new talent profile: Problem framers 41 How leaders are pulling ahead 67 PwC finance benchmarking

PwC insights 17 Beyond the back office: Rethinking the finance function 19 The soft power of the CFO 24 Working capital: An opportunity to create value 31 Creating value with analytics 33 Robotics: An immediate opportunity for finance 37 Talent and culture: Transformation affects people too

Business and finance leader interviews 43 GE Oil & Gas: A new kind of finance for a new world of energy 47 GlaxoSmithKline: Taking control of data quality in tax 49 Royal Mail Group: Delivering business value 51 Becton, Dickinson & Co: A merger focuses finance on the big picture 53 Safilo Group: Speeding up the pace of evolution 55 ClubCorp: Counts on the cloud 57 Invenergy: Driving best practices with technology 59 Sage Group: Enabling tomorrow's finance today 63 British American Tobacco: Setting the stage for a more effective

finance function

65 Informa: Expect the unexpected

How leaders are transforming finance

Finance needs to play a critical role in ensuring organisations continue to thrive. This requires investment in new practices, technologies, and skills that increase the business's capacity to adapt at pace.

Powerful emerging technologies combining automation, artificial intelligence, and data analytics promise to generate insight, yield significant efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve quality for businesses.

At the same time, seismic shifts in customer expectations, channels to market, the competitive landscape and, of course, the global economic and political outlook all combine to add growing risk and uncertainty, but also the opportunity to improve dramatically the decisions businesses face on a daily basis. Yet amid all these changes and pressures the mandate for the finance function remains largely the same: reporting financial results and performance, making sure their organisations are delivering against their strategy, steering the business in a fast-changing world, and being at the forefront of driving business results.

In PwC's 2017 Finance Effectiveness Benchmark report we consider how finance functions are responding to these forces for change which affect business as a whole, but also the way in which finance functions themselves operate and the role they are asked to play in their organisation. There are key challenges for businesses in their quest to grow and create competitive advantage, align costs with their business strategy, and manage the

impact of changes in technology, risk and regulation on their organisation now and in the future. Finance has a key role to play in supporting these areas.

Finance also plays a key role in addressing CEOs' most pressing concerns. Five of the top ten threats cited by CEOs in PwC's 20th CEO Survey1 are around uncertain economic growth, over-regulation, exchange-rate volatility, an increasing tax burden, and social instability. These are topics that carry significant financial implications, and finance functions can prove their worth by offering insights that help to mitigate risks, uncover hidden opportunities, weather economic shocks, and prosper amid uncertainty.

The slowing of the downward cost trend highlighted in this report is one of the most surprising findings to emerge from our most recent benchmarking analysis (See Figure 1). In PwC's 2015 Finance Effectiveness Benchmark report, we predicted that the downward pressure on costs would continue, and possibly even accelerate, as finance organisations applied new automation technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) to their activities. But it appears that for many, finance's rate of technology adoption has lagged behind other corporate functions which have embraced advanced automation

11,379 CEOs in 79 countries were interviewed for PwC's 20th Annual Global CEO Survey, 20 years inside the mind of the CEO...What's next? (ceosurvey)

1 | PwC

and begun to realise its potential. This has contributed to the slowing of the pace of cost reduction in finance over the past two years. There are many pilots and `proofs of concept', but the challenge for finance leaders is to accelerate adoption. As we will discuss in this report, the benefits are wider than cost reduction.

This report will help you assess how your finance function stacks up against your peers, offering real-world examples of leading and emerging practices that top-tier performers are following to gain business advantage. It will show you the way forward, and what future success may look like across a range of areas of your operating model and remit. The data and viewpoints presented here amount to a snapshot of what finance functions are doing now ? whether through

automation, talent strategy, or business partnering to seize opportunities to improve not just their finance functions but their enterprises as a whole.

The case studies and interviews with finance leaders, in section II of the report, show the importance of innovative thinking in helping finance teams move from being a `traditional' to a `progressive' function. Many serve as a reminder that leading finance organisations that fail to recognise the steep change required in their business, risk being left behind and even becoming irrelevant as the market for their products and services evolves.

Finance needs to play a critical role in ensuring organisations continue to thrive. This requires investment in new practices, technologies, and skills that increase the business's capacity to adapt at pace.

Top concerns of CEOs

Percentage of CEOs indicating these areas are a concern

Regulation

Uncertain economic growth

Social instability

80%

82%

Increasing tax burden

Exchange rate

volatility

68%

68% 70%

Source: PwC's 20th Annual Global CEO Survey

Finance Effectiveness Benchmark Report 2017 | 2

About the report

In compiling this report we draw on the detailed, in-depth benchmarking studies we have performed of nearly 600 finance organisations across different industries around the globe. These projects enable us to measure the wide variations in the effectiveness and efficiency of finance across dimensions such as geography, industry, and size of organisation. They also enable us to understand what the finance teams are doing to deliver benefits to their organisations. The data enables us to identify opportunities for finance functions to improve how they operate and quantify the potential benefits such changes may have for the businesses they work within. In addition, we have incorporated the views of business and finance leaders, and others working to make the finance function more productive and insightful, and consequently more capable of contributing to driving results within the context of the organisation's wider strategy.

This report is the seventh we have produced since 2009. The major factor which has changed recently is, unsurprisingly, the impact that advancements in technology and automation have had on what finance teams do, how they do it and what is expected of them. These changes are gathering pace all the time, but cloud, RPA and similar approaches have lowered the cost of entry, and technology can no longer be thought of as a barrier to what can be achieved by finance.

The barrier now appears to be more cultural or organisational and this plays out in many of the client stories and data analysis contained within the report.

For more information about PwC's benchmarking methodology and services, please see page 67 at the end of this report.

What can we learn from top performers?

Where savings have been made by adopting new technologies and ways of working, there has often been an offsetting drive to invest in people and the skills they need in order to harness the potential of the technology solutions at their disposal. With a desire for more analysis and insight and the adoption of new tools to drive this, finance teams have needed to upskill and develop in order to keep pace with the change. This is also a trend which we see continuing ? finance teams will be very different in their composition in five years' time from how they look today.

So how are the top finance functions responding to these challenges and

how are they looking to seize the opportunity presented to them? Over the past several years, finance functions have pursued efficiency improvements through the traditional means of process simplification, standardisation, shared services, and outsourcing. Top-tier functions in particular have made enormous strides. According to our analysis, in efficiency and cost of finance the top quartile finance functions outperform the median by 30% to 40%, and they embody the virtues that we have discussed in the past and throughout this report. Often, we see teams stuck in traditional thinking, with leaders who aren't committed to agility and innovation.

What sets top performers apart?

Spend more time on analysis versus data gathering

Pay

25% more

Spend

20% more time

Pay `insight' finance professionals...

Top performers are still able to...

Run at

36% lower cost

Source: PwC finance benchmark data

3 | PwC

Figure 1: Finance continues to control costs, and top performers are investing in value-added activities

Finance cost as a percentage of revenue

1.02% 0.93% 0.82%

0.93%

0.89%

0.86%

0.54%

0.56%

0.61%

0.56%

0.53%

0.55%

2009

2010 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2015-16

Source: PwC finance benchmark data

Median

Top quartile

Experience shows that it's focus and skill, not magic-bullet technology, that separate the top performers from the rest of the pack:

? They're clear on their value proposition.

? They're not content with business as usual and want to keep improving and challenging the way they operate, the value they add, and how they interface with the business.

? They have an unrelenting focus on efficiency ? challenging what to stop doing, as well as what to standardise and automate.

? They are committed to a `lean' environment and driving continuous year-on-year improvements in ways of working.

? They embrace change, particularly in new ways of working and more visual and technology enabled management styles using collaboration tools to reduce cycle times and new behavioural techniques to get the best of their staff.

? They are starting to embrace new cloud-based and robotic technologies, often instead of the traditional outsourcing route.

? They are highly effective in harnessing skills to genuinely impact business decisions, providing the insight that CEOs are demanding.

Are declining finance costs beginning to reverse?

Finance is increasingly under pressure to focus on innovation and delivering value, but, of course, this needs to be balanced with the continuing focus on efficiency and cost. Our benchmark data shows a slowing in the long-term downward trend in the cost of finance (Figure 1), which may be somewhat surprising given the messages we hear about technology and automation, especially robotics, and the cost savings they can bring. The cost gap between leading performers and those in the median range of performance remains high, but there are signs that it is beginning to narrow. Perhaps this is evidence of the fact that the challenge for the top performers is more difficult as they have already drawn upon many of the traditional techniques used to increase efficiency such as process standardisation, shared services, and automation.

Finance Effectiveness Benchmark Report 2017 | 4

Top performers operate at lower cost not by reducing service levels but by standardising and simplifying their core processes and systems ? enabling them to free up resources to focus on business partnering.

The median cost of finance continues to fall from its 2011-2012 high but at a declining rate. For top performers, there has been a marginal increase in the cost of finance for the first time since 2011-2012, and for the first time since 2009 the gap between top and median performers has fallen below 40%. In part, our studies suggest that this is a reflection of a deliberate investment in finance capability in top-performing organisations. As PwC's CEO survey highlights, CEOs are concerned about having the necessary talent in finance, and the broader business, to drive profitable growth. However, as we discuss later in the report, we believe that in the longer term the downward trend will resume, and probably accelerate, given the proliferation of cost-saving technologies such as RPA and cloudbased finance applications. We only began seeing finance teams look to implement these types of innovative technologies in the last year or so and currently most are in pilot or

proof of concept stage, exploring how best to leverage the technologies across their functional domains. Once organisations begin to `industrialise' the use of these automation tools, we'd expect to see a significant drop in finance costs generally, although this will still be offset by the cost of upskilling the team into a more analytical function to meet the previously mentioned CEO demands.

In our experience, top performers operate at lower cost not by reducing service levels but by standardising and simplifying their core processes and systems, typically enabling them to free up resources to focus on business partnering. It's not about chasing cost reductions ? our interviews conducted as part of the benchmark studies suggest that organisations which focus on a holistic view of change within finance and aligning this with the wider business strategy can achieve a better cost performance and, in addition, a more effective finance function.

Figure 2: Larger companies take advantage of economies of scale Cost of finance by company revenue

1.34%

0.87%

0.89%

0.84%

0.62%

0.57%

0.59%

0.40%

< ?0.7 billion ?0.7-1.9 billion ?2.0-6.6 billion ?6.7 billion

Source: PwC finance benchmark data

Median

Top quartile

5 | PwC

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